How does CRM work for Customer Support Productivity, did you thought of it? Well-trained and knowledgeable; Lethargic and unresponsive; or Average with moderate quickness – How do you define your customer support team?

For most of you, this can be a hard-hitting question considering the fact that you invest a lot in building and running a customer support center. But the sad reality is that often the efforts do not match with the results.

In a recent survey, more than 70 percent of consumers tagged customer support teams as highly unpredictable where the kind of customer service they get were mixed. While some customer support teams were just not up to the par, others who managed to win the hearts of the customers did not maintain the consistency.

Shocked?

As a business entrepreneur – you need to understand that although you implement training programs or put incentive structures in place to encourage good performance, these really does not suffice the need of an efficient and effective contact center. Reason – these strategies alone are not sufficient enough to improve the cumbersome process of the support teams.

CRM

That’s the eternal and proven way to achieving a truly stellar record of customer support productivity, and shift your customer’s experience from mediocre to supreme!

Paraphrasing the words of Alea Milham, (industry expert) – Expecting the contact agents to manually handle both behind the scenes and frontline interactions is way too much. This really does not serve any output and the agents get trapped under the cumbrous process, trying to manually track case histories instead of being on the phone with the leads and customers.

With a robust CRM platform by the side, the process gets streamlined and automated. Right from logging customer interactions, tracking customer data, booking new orders, responding to support tickets, and managing agent performance – they do it all comfortably.

What does the industry research suggest?

Well, industry research also suggests that approximately 50 percent of growing businesses have turned to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to manage the customer support activities.

How CRM works?

A CRM system captures customer feedback/interactions across all mediums and organizes them into one centralized repository. This provides multiple benefits:

1. Support Agents get a complete view of the customer experience in one system. They find all the customer interaction data in one place for easy tracking of the customers satisfaction level.

2. Customer data neatly stored in the CRM helps the agents to be proactive in their approach. They correct the support issues quickly and efficiently. If required, they also modify their approach of dealing with customers to improve the satisfaction percentage.

3. Working in multiple systems often leads to what we call as the ‘data discrepancy’ . This means different versions of data stored in each system. This harms your business tremendously.

Example: Your customer is called twice for follow-up if the case is marked ‘closed’ in one system and ‘open’ in the other. Now imagine the embarrassment for your company.

CRM solves this problem completely. Because it offers one system to manage the entire customer support activities.

Instead of struggling between different applications, support agents pull the information from one common point. They spend less time managing different systems and devote more time on the phone to provide consistent customer support. Amazing isn’t it?

4. Most renowned CRMs offer web to case feature. Any customer complaint registered in the website gets automatically transferred into the CRM database with an automatic alert to the respective contact agent. The customer agent does the necessary follow-up to resolve the customer’s complaint and then updates the case in the CRM system. Time-saving and effective!

5. Since every detail of the customer complaint is stored in the CRM, anytime anywhere, support agents can follow-up on the case details by accessing the CRM account from any internet supported device.

6. Most renowned CRMs also offer partner management and collaboration feature. This empowers the support agents to share customer data across departments. Using the collaboration module, in a flash of a second, agents share the data within or outside the organization.

Final Thoughts

Irrespective of what your business is – your objective is always to achieve the highest outcome at the lowest cost and this is precisely what CRM lets you do.

Once, you have the CRM in place, think how well can your customer support agents perform. CRM will systematically order all the customer data which will allow the agents to easily administer all case histories and follow-ups.

So what do you think? Isn’t CRM a perfect solution to increase your customer support productivity? Do share your comments below. We will love to hear your opinion on this subject.

Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter:@convergehub